A growing segment of the frozen food industry is the preparation of convenience foods and "finger foods". These foods are usually specially prepared so that the purchaser saves much time in final preparation for eating. An illustration of convenience food is frozen french fried potatoes which may be oven heated by the purchaser because the original processor blanched them in oil. Other examples come to mind, like frozen complete dinners, frozen breaded fish portions, and the like.
Finger foods is the term generally given in the related art to battered, breaded bite-sized portions, chunks or elongated sticks which may be prepared by a variety of methods suitable for finger selection by the individual consumer.
Heretofore convenience foods utilizing vegetables or fruit have entered the market within the last decade or so, and have been developed and presented to the consumer in basically two different types of "finger foods". One type of vegetable or fruit finger foods includes individual vegetable or fruit pieces in their natural state which are either battered, breaded and frozen or battered, breaded, deep fat fried to set the coating and impart oil and frozen to be reheated by the purchaser.
The list of such natural food products includes for example onion rings, mushrooms, zucchini slices, cauliflower buds, clarets or heads, eggplant slices and chunks, apple and pineapple slices. However, several problems continue to plague the processor and increase his costs in the processing of this type of finger food product. One is the fact that many vegetables and/or fruit pieces may vary excessively in size, so that the processor must sort and pack into various size ranges to please the consumer. Even when sorting, the processor oftentimes cannot pack by count and rely on accuracy in weight, so he must pack by weight, which means the packer must select various sizes of the food product in an effort to arrive at the desired weight, which is costly in labor because it requires judgment by the workers. Another problem is that individual vegetable pieces are difficult to arrange on high speed processing lines so that the arranging becomes still more labor intensive. Another problem is that a substantial quantity of the vegetable or fruit product in its natural state cannot be used because, even though the food is wholesome and nutritious, it may be unattractive in size, shape, texture, etc.
A second type of vegetable or fruit finger foods is for the processor to take vegetable or fruit pieces which may include scraps which, heretofore have been discarded as waste but which are still wholesome for human consumption, and to thoroughly mix them with a suitable binder, well known in the art, into a porridge-like mixture. This mixture is then extruded into a shape that, in an effort to gain consumer acceptance, is oftentimes made to simulate the shape of the vegetable or fruit in its natural state. As will be appreciated, the taste of such extruded product is not particularly characteristic of the "natural taste" of the food product per se but rather to a significant degree is characteristic of and dependent upon the binder used which the consumer finds unattractive and unacceptable.
Heretofore the assignee of the present invention has utilized a process using fish and poultry products in which individual frozen pieces of fish or poultry are placed into a suitable press and compressed under substantial pressure into a frozen block. Because fish and poultry are known to be inherently high in protein, it is believed that during this compression, weeping or protein secretion occurs which enables the individual pieces to adhere to each other to form the frozen food block as well as in subsequent cooking of the food pieces.
To the present time in the food processing industry it has been generally believed that this frozen block process is not adaptable to other products such as vegetables and/or fruits and like products by reason of their lacking the type of protein found in fish or poultry.
As will be hereinafter explained in greater detail, the applicants hereof have discovered a new and novel process heretofore unknown in the related art for making vegetable and fruit finger foods, which process incorporates therein the formation of a frozen block of vegetables and/or fruit and the like and wherein the raw vegetable or fruit food material, in its natural and frozen state, constitutes all or substantially all of the food product that is in the end "finger food" product resulting from this process. The term "raw vegetables" is hereinafter identified to be the products presently available in the frozen food department of a typical market which conventionally may be either raw or blanched, i.e. partially cooked.